The most common question I’m asked is: How has Eagle Creek stayed relevant over its 18 year history?
In these nearly two decades, the United States has been through two major recessions, experienced an abundance of new commercial CRM cloud technologies, watched the services industry evaporate into an offshore model, all while the deployment methodology pendulum simultaneously swung from waterfall to agile. Remaining relevant had challenges.
Eagle Creek began in the hey-day of Siebel and our value proposition was built on simple, sustainable rules which we lived by religiously:
- Our target market is the Fortune 2000.
- Our customer is the CIO.
- We concentrate on the corporate enterprise.
- We focus on technology solutions that support or enhance the business or the businesses’ customer.
- We offer high quality technical resources at a price-point lower than the major consulting companies.
When it came down to it, Eagle Creek’s relevancy really depended on our commitment to the corporate enterprise.
Because most of our early employees had a background in commercial enterprise ERP applications, the process of deploying CRM technologies to enterprise implementations was easy. Additionally, most of our employees had international experience and so we never shied away from global CRM enterprise implementation. The intersection of domestic and global perspectives gave us the foundation we needed to excel with CRM in the enterprise.
Our enterprise CRM concentration allowed us to become highly proficient in other areas as well (data and integration being the obvious). We gained expertise with CRM related technologies such as MDM and analytics. And as this evolved, our customers brought us into application development using Java and .Net.
At first, we were surprised our competition didn’t gain the same expertise we did. But we realized most of our competition only implemented Siebel as a point solution, which would never be enough to sustain relevance with the corporate enterprise. As a result, 90% of our competition went out of business in our first seven years of operation.
Eagle Creek’s path led us to the biggest CRM implementations. To date, we’ve had as many as 120 consultants on a single Siebel global implementation – a claim few can make.
In the last decade, new CRM technology – led by Salesforce - took hold. Instead of Siebel, Salesforce became the number one technology we deployed. With this change came the need for a supporting stack of technologies that would take CRM into the enterprise and out to the business’ customer.
No different than before, most technology companies didn’t make the investment to gain the enterprise knowhow and found their niche as a point solution company. It costs a lot of money, time and effort to be an expert in Salesforce, application development, mobility, web development, integration, data, global deployments, agile and build an onshore model.
Our original core value proposition – including our commitment to the corporate enterprise – was sustainable and allowed us to do what the other technology organizations could not. Each day we stacked new blocks onto our original 18-year-old base – which remained the foundation for our future.
When asked what makes Eagle Creek unique to the market, most expect my answer to be our creation of the U.S. Onshore model: we deliver high-value results for 40% less money than the traditional onsite option. Our U.S. Onshore model does what offshore can’t. But as much as onshore is a noticeable differentiator now, it will eventually evolve into standard practice. Who doesn’t have offshore capabilities?
Based on my experience, our real uniqueness lies in our commitment to our customers and in building and sustaining corporate enterprise expertise. Delivery models and point solutions will come and go, but the enterprise will always remain a top priority with our customer.
18 years of relevancy is really 18 years of truly knowing our customer. We were grounded by the corporate enterprise which gave us the knowledge of our customer. In the end, this knowledge remains the backbone of our relevancy, and is the root of the strategic decisions we continue to make as a company.